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GIMP and fax

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GIMP and fax Neil Youngman 29 Aug 06:19
  GIMP and fax Tobias Jakobs 29 Aug 09:58
   GIMP and fax Neil Youngman 29 Aug 11:58
  GIMP and fax Michael Schumacher 29 Aug 13:57
   GIMP and fax temp301303@youngman.org.uk 29 Aug 14:11
Neil Youngman
2014-08-29 06:19:18 UTC (over 9 years ago)

GIMP and fax

I'm looking for an efficient command line method to add header text into fax documents.

This can be done with ImageMagick, but it's painfully slow and uses far too much memory if it's a large fax (tens or hundreds of pages). I'm wondering if GIMP script mode might help. My immediate impression is that GIMP is not a good tool for the job.

The problems I see are:

1. The FAQ says that the image type for TIFF must be RGB, but fax is monochrome.
2. The faxg3 and tiff functions to load and save do not offer an obvious way to handle 1 page at a time and the memory requirement to load hundreds of pages would be excessive. 3. Although group 3 compression is supported there is no obvious way to save an image as black and white.

I'm not familiar with GIMP, so it may be that I just haven't found the right functions. Can it handle monochrome, multi-page fax and do so efficiently?

Neil Youngman

Tobias Jakobs
2014-08-29 09:58:49 UTC (over 9 years ago)

GIMP and fax

Hello Neil,

I'm not sure that Gimp is the right tool, if you want some thing lighter then ImageMagic. I would try VIPS [1], its optimized for speed and low memory use [2]. Wikipedia changed form ImageMagic to VIPS last year. [3]

Regards Tobias

[1] http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=VIPS [2] http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=Speed_and_Memory_Use [3]
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/09/12/vipsscaler-implementation-wikimedia-sites/

2014-08-29 8:19 GMT+02:00 Neil Youngman :

I'm looking for an efficient command line method to add header text into fax documents.

This can be done with ImageMagick, but it's painfully slow and uses far too much memory if it's a large fax (tens or hundreds of pages). I'm wondering if GIMP script mode might help. My immediate impression is that GIMP is not a good tool for the job.

The problems I see are:

1. The FAQ says that the image type for TIFF must be RGB, but fax is monochrome.
2. The faxg3 and tiff functions to load and save do not offer an obvious way to handle 1 page at a time and the memory requirement to load hundreds of pages would be excessive.
3. Although group 3 compression is supported there is no obvious way to save an image as black and white.

I'm not familiar with GIMP, so it may be that I just haven't found the right functions. Can it handle monochrome, multi-page fax and do so efficiently?

Neil Youngman
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Neil Youngman
2014-08-29 11:58:56 UTC (over 9 years ago)

GIMP and fax

On 29/08/2014 10:58, Tobias Jakobs wrote:

Hello Neil,

I'm not sure that Gimp is the right tool, if you want some thing lighter then ImageMagic. I would try VIPS [1], its optimized for speed and low memory use [2]. Wikipedia changed form ImageMagic to VIPS last year. [3]

VIPS looks like a neat tool, but I can't see how to script multipage images or an equivalent of ImageMagick's annotate function, so I'm not sure it will do what I need.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Neil

Michael Schumacher
2014-08-29 13:57:35 UTC (over 9 years ago)

GIMP and fax

Gesendet: Freitag, 29. August 2014 um 08:19 Uhr Von: "Neil Youngman"

I'm looking for an efficient command line method to add header text into fax documents.

This can be done with ImageMagick, but it's painfully slow and uses far too much memory if it's a large fax (tens or hundreds of pages).

You're using the Q8 version of ImageMagick? "too much memory consume" was a frequent complaint of Q16 users.

I've successfully deployed GraphicsMagick to fax servers for similar tasks for years, and have never seen problems like this - only very few of them had to handle fax messages with more than 20 pages, though.

Preferring GM over IM was due to my somewhat mixed experience with IM in the past, as the latter's random features per release were starting to annoy me. I haven't kept up with its overall performance and development in the past 8 years, however.

Regards,
Michael
GPG: 96A8 B38A 728A 577D 724D 60E5 F855 53EC B36D 4CDD
temp301303@youngman.org.uk
2014-08-29 14:11:21 UTC (over 9 years ago)

GIMP and fax

On 29/08/2014 14:57, Michael Schumacher wrote:

Gesendet: Freitag, 29. August 2014 um 08:19 Uhr Von: "Neil Youngman"
I'm looking for an efficient command line method to add header text into fax documents.

This can be done with ImageMagick, but it's painfully slow and uses far too much memory if it's a large fax (tens or hundreds of pages).

You're using the Q8 version of ImageMagick? "too much memory consume" was a frequent complaint of Q16 users.

I've successfully deployed GraphicsMagick to fax servers for similar tasks for years, and have never seen problems like this - only very few of them had to handle fax messages with more than 20 pages, though.

Preferring GM over IM was due to my somewhat mixed experience with IM in the past, as the latter's random features per release were starting to annoy me. I haven't kept up with its overall performance and development in the past 8 years, however.

GraphicsMagick looks almost perfect. It's much more efficient than ImageMagick and it does almost everything I need. One feature doesn't seem to do what I expect, but if I can't get it to work, I can work around it.

Thanks for that pointer.

Neil Youngman